'Small Things Like These' read by Andrew Bennett

Claire Keegan’s short novel Small Things Like These continues its impressive march: best-seller, widely adopted in schools here for the Leaving Certificate, successful film, and in another form a staged reading by Andrew Bennett, which I went to last night at the Pavilion Theatre. It continues on tour into January.

It is a rare book which could take such an approach, but this is perfectly suited to it: reading all of the text takes 2 and a quarter hours, with an extra 15 minutes for the interval, which is perfectly timed just after the crucial Section 4, when Furlong first goes to the convent. The director, Ben Barnes of Four Rivers, has designed the production to use a modest amount of movement and a few carefully-chosen props to prevent the stage becoming overly-static without breaking the spell of the narrative. Andrew Bennett read each of the seven sections from a pile of seven covered copies on a little table, laying down the completed one on the floor around that table, a visual representation of his progress through the story. Eleanor McEvoy sat at the side, and, playing a range of instruments, underscored Bennett’s reading with great subtlety. Her accompanying music effectively picked out transitions in the story (including what George Saunders calls ‘escalations’).

Andrew Bennett featured in the perfectly-achieved Irish language film version of Claire Keegan’s Foster, An Cailín Ciúin/The Quiet Girl. In my review I wrote about his performance in it alongside Carrie Crowley:

Carrie Crowley and Andrew Bennett are extraordinary as the Kinsellas: Crowley’s face etched with the emotions she is rarely allowed to express openly, and Bennett deeply moving as we witness his delicately developing closeness to the girl, his initial gruff shyness dropping away. That last scene is the culmination of all they have been through, as Crowley weeps in the car and Clinch wraps herself around Bennett. He said of one powerful scene (so much centres on the kitchen), that ‘all I had to do was eat sandwiches’ but of course there is a world of experienced acting in what he does.

It is difficult to imagine a sustained reading better than this. We have to listen to a single voice for over two hours without losing attention, and the reader needs to match the pacing and shaping of Keegan’s story-telling. Bennett has a richly-resonant voice, and is careful not to overstate key moments. Sometimes he needs to get across dialogue singlehandedly, particularly with women (Eileen, Mrs Kehoe, the Mother Superior), and he does this skilfully without trying to mimic their voices. Most of all it feels like a special treat as an adult to listen for over two hours to such story-telling. Meghan Cox Gurdon has written about this in her book The Enchanted Hour: the miraculous power of reading aloud in the age of distraction, and pointed out that when we grow up we do not have to suffer the loss of listening in such a way. It is a collective experience too: one of the interesting things for me, having studied, taught and thought about the book so much, was the extent to which the audience reacted at specific times - gentle laughter, intakes of breath, that particular depth of total silence at the harder moments. 

Another part of the experience was hearing particular phrases which now stood out for me and words which previously I had skated over. Literary cadences stood out: Milton, Shakespeare, Frost and, at the end Joyce from the famous conclusion to ‘The Dead’. As Andrew Bennett’s voice sped up with urgency while Furlong walked the girl Sarah back through New Ross towards his house, and Eleanor McEvoy’s playing matched him with a version of ‘Away in a Manger’, you could feel the audience being lifted up by the tenderness and riskiness of what was happening.

At the start of the evening, when we entered the theatre, the backdrop displayed the first part of a sentence from the 1916 Proclamation which is an epigraph to the book (see the photo, top). When Andrew Bennett finished his reading, he put down the final copy, and placed a small white Christmas tree on top of the books, and stood to the side as the lights went down and the quotation was completed on the screen,

… cherishing all of the children of the national equally.

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